


In and Out

by apollos



Series: all the times in-between [8]
Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, BDSM, Bondage, Catharsis, Catholicism, Flashbacks, Gags, M/M, Unhealthy Relationships, but like in the psychological sense of that term
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-10
Updated: 2019-10-10
Packaged: 2020-12-07 17:17:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20979536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apollos/pseuds/apollos
Summary: Still unsettled after the high school reunion, Dennis tries a few different ways to make himself feel better. Mac is there to help, as always. Takes place between seasons 7 and 8.





	1. In

**Author's Note:**

> continuity to this series: mac and dennis's high school days as covered in "count no man happy until the end is known" are obliquely referenced and elaborated upon. there's also a reference to "physical theology" and a more subtle one to "holy sick divine night" as well. you could probably read this independently, but i would suggest you at least read count no man before this one.

All these _fucking _years. Nothing changes and everything changes. Mac knows Dennis by now. He knows the signs of that dark thing writing beneath Dennis's skin and in his mind like a sentient tumor. It's like this movie they once watched about a group of jackasses in Mexico, _The Ruins, _with carnivorous plants that eat them from the inside out. The girl goes insane and tries to cut them out of her skin. Whatever it is that makes Dennis like he is, it's like that.

Dennis seems easy enough at the bar, ribbing the cool kids and talking about how sorry their lives must really be, but Mac sees the tendon in his neck pop every once in a while, the smile fail to reach his eyes, the curl of his fingers around the neck of a beer. Mac puts his all in joining in, too, but in the back of his mind he's wondering what will happen when the lights turn off and the doors close and everybody goes home.

"Hey," Mac says hours later when they're seated in the Range Rover. He has ten minutes to learn the nature of this disaster, probably less, because it's three in the morning and the streets are empty.

"Total _fuckin' _bust." Dennis laughs. "Tim Murphy's wife thought I was gay, can you believe that?"

_Uh, yeah, I can, actually. _"No way."

"Yeah! This is what I get for trying to speed the system up. It _works_. I _know _that. Gotta give myself room to breathe, you know? But that Tim Murphy—I thought he slept with my prom date—what an _asshole_."

"Whether he banged her or not, he's still an asshole," Mac offers. He watches Dennis's hands on the steering wheel, the way he keeps thumping it with his palm whenever a word snags between his teeth. "Like, a super asshole. I heard him saying you and Dee were probably creepy Nazi incest twins once. That's why I told him it was you."

"Creepy Nazi incest twins?" Dennis barks. Mac hadn't realized he'd been holding his thighs tight, his heels raised off the floor, but they relax when Dennis sounds genuinely amused.

"Yeah, dude. Comic book villain creepy Nazi incest twins."

"Now that's a look."

Mac squeezes his hands into fists and then releases them. He breathes, in-and-out, in-and-out. Dennis drives home fast like this, the streetlights running over his face like a strobe in a club. His teeth are so white—he must have whitened them for the reunion. Some of the mascara he wears has smudged under his eyes and his jacket is off in the backseat somewhere along with the girdle, his collar is crumpled, his shirt is untucked. He looks unhinged, he looks beautiful. Like any good Catholic, Mac has always loved the things that hurt him the most.

It does not surprise Mac when Dennis is on him as soon as they shut the door, hooking his fingers in Mac's beard and tugging, kissing him against the wall, knee between Mac's legs. Mac wants to say, _and she thought you were gay, huh_, but to do that would be to send a sledgehammer through their foundation, perhaps the one thing in this world Mac doesn't want to break, so instead he grabs Dennis's cock through his pants and he licks the taste of melting concealer from around his lips. It's the first time Dennis has touched him since the bunker incident, and it's not unusual to go long stretches of times without this, and every time Mac thinks he's going to say no the next time and nip it all in the bud and _move past it_, but Mac doesn't say no, Mac says yes, and they fuck on the couch and afterwards Mac slinks off to sleep on his mattress alone.

It seems the storm has been avoided, that whatever's under Dennis's skin lies dormant for now. Mac wakes up late the next morning, past when they would usually open the bar. When he walks into the kitchen to pour himself a bowl of cereal, he sees Dennis dressed and sitting on the couch and going through a yearbook with an assortment of office supplies in front of him. Something to be dealt with later. Mac eats his cereal over the kitchen sink while thinking nonsensical early morning thought, rinses the bowl out and then takes a nice, long, hot, cleansing, baptismal shower. Never again, he tells himself. Repent the sins and move past it.

"Whatcha doin'?" he asks once he's dressed, sitting next to the still stationary Dennis.

"Going through and counting up all the chicks I banged in high school. I marked the ones I already did with an _X_ and put a star next to them if I have it on tape."

"Ah."

"I've also started notes on how to best exact revenge from Adriano and his ilk. Figure we can propose it to the gang later, they'll be in on it."

Mac looks at the notes Dennis has written in Sharpie in the margins of their senior yearbook, sees words like _superglue, fire _and _bees—allergic? _He looks at the hard line of Dennis's eyes. He sighs.

"Den," Mac says, voice soft from intention and, perhaps, a little fear. "Maybe we should leave it."

Dennis cocks his head. "When have we _ever _left something like this?"

"It's just…" Mac shifts. He watches as Dennis raises the sharpie and sticks it between his molars, starting to chew. "That's high school, man. Like twenty years ago. Let's just move past it."

"I met you in high school. You want me to move past you?"

"That's not what I meant." Mac narrows his eyes at Dennis. "I've _always _been here. When's the last time you even thought of Adriano before last night?"

Dennis doesn't respond, just keeps chewing his pen. He slaps the yearbook off his lap and it skids, hitting the wall with a soft _thump_. Dennis rises and starts to pace, lacing his hands beneath his back. Mac settles in, waits for the monologue. "They _will _give me what is mine," Dennis starts. "I _am _superior to them, and they _must _recognize that."

"Sure," Mac says. He could placate Dennis and ride the rant out, knows that that's probably what he should do, but he doesn't want to do that. He wants to return to their normal lives and the bar and whatever dumbass plan they come up with for today that _doesn't _involve assholes from high school. He wants to kill the thing inside Dennis's skin before Dennis scratches himself open to get at it. Exposes it to the air and lets it grow. "_We _know that Dennis, you know—me, Charlie, Dee, Frank—so that's enough, right? We're enough?"

"No!" Dennis stops and flicks his head towards Mac. The Sharpie has migrated horizontally, looks like a horse bit around which Dennis speaks. "It's the fucking frat house all over again! I cannot let this go on!"

"Alright, so what do you want to do?"

"Send bees to their houses! Leave bags of shit in their car! Fuck their wives and get revenge!"

Mac exhales through his mouth and rests his head back on the couch. Closes his eyes.

"You don't seem excited," Dennis notes, his voice flat. The Sharpie rolls from his teeth and onto the floor.

"Yeah, bro, I'm not into it."

"Not _into it_?"

"Nope."

"And why not?" Dennis's voice has come closer. Mac can sense his presence; he's looming over Mac, standing just between him and the coffee table.

"'Cause I'm happy _now_," Mac says, cracking his eyes open. "I don't give a fuck about high school, alright? It's done. Over with. Gone. In the past. _C'est la vie_."

"Well." Dennis bends at the waist and takes Mac's head in his hands, staring into his eyes. "I'll just have to get you into it."

"What?" Mac asks, his voice smothered by Dennis's grip on his face.

"Stay here."

Dennis saunters out of the apartment.

Mac stays on the couch for a few seconds, then gets up. He takes the Sharpie and puts it back in the empty pencil cup on their shelf—Dennis will hide wherever he hides them when he wants to—and then retrieves the yearbook from the floor. He closes that and puts it on the coffee table, hoping that that will signal that Mac respects Dennis's wishes and ideas but does not want to participate in them whatsoever. Dennis is not angry at Mac, that's the good part. All these fucking years, Mac knows he's done worse than sleep with Dennis's prom date. Dennis is angry at something other than Mac, and in this case, Mac can't just go out and choke whatever's threatening Dennis and making him feel unsafe. The quiet custodian behind Dennis's destruction, all Mac can do is be the one acted upon, again and again, and so he shall be.

Dennis returns in just a few minutes, holding an assortment of things. Duct tape and zip ties, mostly. "Remember these?"

"Those are your _tools_," Mac tests, trying not to sound too weirded-out. "What are you planning there, buddy?"

"Compliance." Dennis walks over to Mac and sets the items down on the coffee table—on top of the yearbook—and then fists his hands in the front of Mac's shirt, pulls him up.

Oh. Some weird sex thing. Mac should've known.

"First," Dennis says, "you need to be reminded of why we hate them."

"Okay."

Mac lets his body go soft, lets himself trust Dennis. Dennis has done nothing to earn his trust, to earn his faith—if anything, he's done the opposite—but Mac is a good Catholic, Mac is a pious person, Mac knows how to read between the lines and see the things that are hard to see. He clears his mind and focuses on Dennis's hands on him, on Dennis's breath in his ear, on Dennis's cologne in his lungs. Dennis holds him around the shoulders with one arm, and then with the other one he reaches into Mac's pants and grabs ahold of his boxers, yanks them up high.

"This is what they did to you, right?" Dennis asks. His voice sounds husky and heavy, and something between that and the uncomfortable pressure around Mac's groin and the low pitch of Dennis's voice causes Mac's cock to stand up like it's been called. Dennis chuckles when he steps himself closer to Mac, feels the rise of his erection. "Oh, _sorry_. Did you like it back then, too?"

"Nuh-no," Mac stutters as Dennis pulls tighter, the pressure replaced more by pain. Closes his eyes and begs Dennis not to make him say that he likes it because it's _Dennis_, but surely Dennis isn't going to do that, because that's not the game they're playing right now.

"Turn around. Bend over the table."

Mac does as he told. He thinks Dennis will release his grip on his boxers when he turns, but Dennis only pulls harder, moving himself with Mac to keep the tension tight. They feel like they're about to rip. Dennis sweeps everything off the coffee table, pens and highlighters and tape skittering across the floor, and Mac wants to protest that he _just _straightened up, but he sucks on his own teeth to keep his mouth shut. Dennis seems to notice that, and he forces something between Mac's teeth—a ball gag. It has straps that go around his head and Dennis secures them in place. He fingers Mac's earlobes and pinches. Mac's mouth fills with saliva while his cock struggles against the tight space between his legs, wanting to stiffen.

Dennis lets Mac's boxers loose, finally, but only so that he can take the zip-ties and pull Mac's hands together behind his back. He settles in back there, pressing his body over Mac's. "Compliance," he repeats.

Mac nods.

"It's easy to get, if you know how."

More like: it's easy for Mac to give.

"I want your compliance, Mac. I want you by my side on this. Like you should be."

Mac shivers. He wants that, too, but he's thinking more along the lines of their names on Paddy's deed together, eating dinner together, scamming rich jabronis out of their money together—the ways in which they already _are _together. Things he knows Dennis wants, and Dennis likes, too, but Dennis doesn't know how to say that. Dennis thinks this is what he needs from Mac, doesn't realize that this is what he already has, and so Mac will kneel here, the altar at which Dennis prays and the paper on which Dennis writes, until Dennis figures it all out for himself, too.

"Alright." Dennis stands up and swipes his foot under Mac's chest, getting him to rock back from the table. Mac's legs haven't been bound, so he just sits on the floor. His ass burns, feels raw from the invasion and throbbing with relief at the same time. No stranger to anal play, even if he prefers to be on top, it feels something nearing _nice_. "Get up. Come to the bedroom."

Mac follows, having to struggle a bit to find his balance. His underwear seems off, different, the elastic now completely ruined. They sag around down his thighs as he walks. _The bedroom _means Dennis's, of course. Dennis holds the door open for him, then shuts and locks it. He pushes Mac to the bed with a hand between his shoulders.

"I could do anything, you see?" Dennis is pacing again, Mac the perfect audience. "I am capable. I am powerful. You see, Mac, you're _right_—I am better than them. But what use it is being better if they don't know it? That's why I have to do this. To show them."

Mac can't speak, given the gag in his mouth, so he just sits there and watches Dennis. His cock is starting to soften and he's starting to get a little saddened; this exercise of Dennis seems aimless, not just in settling high school grudges but as far as getting off goes, too, and normally getting Dennis off is the best way to get him to calm down. Mac wants to touch him, wants to kiss him, but he can't, his restraints both physical and metaphysical.

"But first I have to show you. Convince _you_." Dennis pads over to Mac and runs his hands through his hair, scratches his beard. Pets Mac like a dog. Mac leans into the touch. "I could leave you right now, helpless, defenseless, in this room. I _could_. But why would I do that to you? To what end would it serve?" Dennis pulls back one of the straps of Mac's ball gag, lets it strike his skin. It stings, tears springing to Mac's eyes. "Did I hurt you? Do you want to be hurt?"

Does Mac _want _to be hurt? Mac _can _be hurt, can handle the hurt. Does Dennis want Mac to be hurt? Too many calculations for Mac to run, too many things to try to figure out, so Mac doesn't do anything, just blinks the tears from his eyelashes and feels them slide down his face and stares up at Dennis. That thing moving beneath his skin. Mac knows how to cut it out, but Dennis has taken away the knife.

"I don't want to hurt you." Dennis sighs, and across his eyes flickers something true, something deeper than that deep, dark thing. Mac thinks it's as close to an admission of love he's ever gotten.

Dennis sits next to Mac on the bed for a long time. Mac continues to sit next to him, knowing there's nothing he can really _do_, but he scoots himself as close as he can and hooks one foot around Dennis's. Dennis allows this, and Dennis stares down at his hands clasped in his lap.

Mac thinks about what he would say if he weren't gagged. Maybe something like, _alright, I got it, let's go to Paddy's and see what they think_, and he'd probably text Dee and tell her to think of a way to shut Dennis down, but then Dee'd have blackmail against him and Mac thinks lying to Dennis would be unwise, so that's out. He could challenge him, could say mean things like _this make you feel like a man? You got it out of your system? _And then they'd fight and then Dennis would feel better, like after a good fuck. That's probably the smartest option. Or Mac could say _let me make you feel good _and kiss Dennis until he forgets everything about high school except for smoking weed in the dirt lot and kissing Mac in Charlie's mom's basement, but that would be like telling Dennis he loved him, like telling Dennis he _wants _to love him and not feel guilty about it, and that would send him and Dennis straight to Hell. If Mac is Dennis's protector, he is also trying to save his soul, even more so than his own. So really, apart from the strange comfort of having something big and thick in his mouth that's keeping his cock just a little hard, Mac's thankful for the gag in his mouth. It dams all the stupid things that would have fallen out.

Finally, Dennis reaches back and unties Mac's hands. Mac brings them in front of him and rubs at them; the zip-ties hurt, sure, but more than that his arms feel stiff from being forced into the position. Then Dennis unhooks the ball gag, moving it gently, like a groom removing his bride's veil.

"I think I got my point across," he says.

"Sure did." Mac offers a shaky smile. "You want to go to Paddy's?"

"No. I changed my mind." Dennis runs his knuckles down the side of Mac's face, tangles his fingers in his beard again, hooks his thumb in Mac's mouth. "You like the ball gag? I know you did."

Mac holds Dennis's eyes and nods.

"Good boy." Dennis pats Mac's cheek and then stands up. He stretches and yawns like nothing happened, like he just woke up, like he and Mac were just in his room to watch a sex tape or grab something from his dresser for a scheme. "Let's watch some Netflix before Paddy's, yeah? Planet Earth? I feel kind of hungover. Getting old fuckin' sucks."

Mac stands up and shimmies his hips, his ruined boxers snagged around his thighs, his shoulder joints rolling over, his ears stinging. "Sounds good to me."


	2. Out

A few weeks pass. Mac's strange malaise passes with them. He starts to feel energized again, less like he has to move his limbs through molasses, and Dennis presents him with a gym membership of his own. "A gift," Dennis declares. "Also because there's _no _way you're going to convince the people that you're me, looking the way that you do." A thinly veiled excuse and insult, but Mac takes the membership and finds that he missed the gym, the sterile environment, the cacophony of strong men grunting, the heavy burn of iron in his arms. He all but forgets about the high school reunion incident, about Dennis's reaction, about the wedgie and the ball gag and the zip ties. Something else in the past; another pseudo-therapy session for Dennis. Instead, Mac relishes the smiles, the movie nights, the dinners at Applebee's or T.G.I. Friday's or Chili's, the pranks and the schemes.

Then it's a Wednesday morning and he and Dennis are the only ones in the bar. The previous night was Movie Night, which had been cut short when Dennis leaned over and stuck his tongue in Mac's ear and his hands down Mac's pants and told him that he was starting to look good again. This cut _The Thing _short, resulted in Mac waking up in Dennis's bed at dawn and creeping out to lie awake in his own room until he heard the sounds of Dennis starting his morning routine in the main part of the apartment. An early day at Paddy's it was.

"Have you heard of age regression?" Dennis asks. He's behind the bar, refilling some supplies, and Mac is on a barstool, flicking through a fitness magazine and drinking a light beer.

"You know I haven't, bro," Mac says.

"It's this psychological theory. I wrote a paper on it once, in college."

"Sounds _so _interesting." Mac flips a page, studies an in-depth workout for core strength.

"The idea is that you hypnotize somebody and make them believe they're younger than they are. Then you work through their traumas. It's as if they're living their life all over again, but in a safe environment where they can process what happened to them."

"Mmm, I don't see the point, bro. I'm pretty happy with my life."

A quick white flash invades Mac's space; Dennis has flicked a rag at him like a towel in a high school locker room. "Listen to me, jackhole."

"I was listening!" Mac reels. "Age regression, trauma, weird nerdy anti-God science shit, got it."

Dennis looks towards the ceiling and Mac watches as his chest rises and falls with timed breaths. "I want to try it."

"O-_kay_."

Dennis looks down and meets Mac's eyes. Mac's heart twitches when he sees the way they're set, the hard line, how Dennis has his jaw clenched, popping with intention and the dark thing underneath the skin. "Not with hypnosis, because that would require an outside party, and that would not be ideal for our purposes."

"_Our _purposes?" Mac stutters.

Dennis leans into his space. "I'm still thinking about the reunion," he says with a voice that tries too hard to be nonchalant. His breath smells of coffee and toothpaste and he's talking low and soft like he's trying to seduce Mac into agreeing with him. "And, yeah, maybe revenge isn't the best way to go about things, in this case. They're not willing, and my attempts to make them willing have, unfortunately and unusually, failed. What's the point of revenge if they don't care?" Mac squeezes his thighs and curls his fingers against them, and maybe Dennis _is _hypnotizing him, because he's feeling like a fourteen-year-old boy praying not to be called to the front of the classroom in his condition right now. "_But _to soothe my spirit, set things right, you know, I have a plan."

"A plan," Mac echoes.

"A plan. You see, if you remember high school, you worshipped me—"

"I did _not _worship you, dude!"

"Yes, you did!" Dennis barely raises his voice, and then he smooths it over with a teeth-baring smile. "You'll _see _that you did when we regress."

"I have not agreed to this."

Dennis stands up and raises his eyebrows in the direction of Mac's crotch. "Uh, you have a boner right now."

"Yeah, and?"

"That looks like agreement to me."

Mac rolls his eyes. "_Dude_," he says. "It's a _fear _boner, alright? Because you're not making any goddamned sense."

"It will make sense!" Dennis swoons back into Mac's space and takes Mac's face in his hands. "Just trust me on this, okay? You can do that for me, can't you, baby boy?"

Mac tries to groan something out, but Dennis shushes him by running his fingers over his lip. Mac wants to say, _not fair. _Mac wants to say, _you're temptation itself. _Mac wants to say, _you're a devil wearing human skin. _He feels bad about the last one immediately. Dennis is many things, but he also _isn't _many things, and he's not a devil. Maybe a fallen angel, once a heavenly creature and now mired in Hell, but not Hell's naked creation. (Isn't that what Lucifer _wants _you to think? That beautiful things cannot be his? Mac's head is spinning, not enough blood, and a tiny part of his brain tells him, _how could the devil live in Dennis's skin when his touch feels so right_ and another part is saying _Dennis has a soul and I can save that soul_ and another part is saying _maybe the devil is that deep dark thing I see sometimes._)

Dennis interrupts his thoughts by letting go of his face and waving a hand in front of his eyes. "Go take care of yourself," he says, gesturing again to Mac's persistent boner. "The rest of them will be here soon, and I don't want to have to explain _that_."  
Mac grunts and slides off the stool. He goes to the bathroom but he doesn't jack off, boner wilting as fast as it came. He grips the sides of the sink and looks at himself in the mirror. It makes him dizzy, the way it's been making him dizzy lately. His own face has shifted before his eyes, thin to fat to thin again, scruff to beard to scruff again, and it feels like his features have been rearranged and the world turned upside down. He splashes some water on his face and practices a smile. Of all of Dennis's weird plans and schemes—especially when it comes to sex and sex-like encounters—this one isn't so bad. High school with Dennis wasn't bad at all.

That night, the Range Rover, the dark city with the bright lights. Mac bounces his leg until Dennis tells him to stop. He rubs at his face and watches Dennis, instead. Dennis hums, taps his fingers on the steering wheel in tune with whatever he has in his head. He misses their usual turn and Mac groans. "I _hate _when you do this."

"You love my surprises."

"I just said I hate them!"

"They're alwaysgood for you, Mac."

Mac groans again, slumps against the window like a little kid. "You're just so fucking – _cryptic _about them, you know? Ominous."

"Yeah, 'cause it's a _surprise_, asshole. Anyway, this is key. You'll understand."

Dennis pulls up in front of the old park by their old school and Mac does understand. It looks the same as it did twenty years ago, dingy but not rusty, dilapidated but not destroyed. Dennis tells Mac, come on, get out, and Mac leaves the Range Rover like the man about to take the first steps on the moon. Mac swivels his head around, assesses the situation. Two men in their upper thirties on a playground in the middle of the night is suspicious as shit. Either something with drugs or something with sex, and if it's the sex, it's the unsavory, seedy, sinful sort of sex. Mac isn't thinking of himself as that mid-thirties man, though. He's thinking of himself at sixteen and sitting on a swing and waiting for the weird rich kid to show up and buy some weed off him. He's thinking of himself quaking in his boots and talking mad loud and mad shit, to cover it, of running his dirty hands over everything Dennis owns because he just can't resist, of waiting to be kicked out of the nice car and into the mud and laughed at. He's thinking of the slow, painful, and still incomplete realization that that _isn't _going to happen. He's thinking of laying on his back on the creaking merry-go-round, arguing with Dennis and Charlie about what direction to drag the toes of their shoes in the dirt to make it actually _spin_, and he's thinking of the sky reflecting in Dennis's blue eyes and he brushes the back of his hand against Mac's and then never, ever speaking of it, so that Mac isn't sure if it happened or not, and Charlie starts talking about the shapes that he sees in the clouds, and Mac's thinking about how to get the girl from fourth period to sleep with him and his parents to love him. He's waiting for Dennis to turn cruel but Dennis never turns cruel, or if he does it's not for long, and instead he lets Mac touch all his shit, he lets Mac ride passenger seat, he lets Mac call him his friend, and he slides his hands into Mac's pants when they're seated in the back of a movie theater on a ticket Dennis paid for, and they're never talking about it, and Mac is always wondering, and Dennis is always doing—

Dennis sneaks up on Mac as easily as he did back then. As easily as he always has. He throws his arms over Mac's shoulders, hugging him from behind, and sticks his tongue in Mac's ear. Mac jerks out of instinct—what is it with Dennis and tongues and ears—and then melts into the touch. "Hey," Dennis whispers wet and open-mouthed, pressing a kiss to the sensitive spot underneath Mac's earlobe.

Mac counts back from ten and looks to the sky. Black and void. This is South Philly. There are no stars.

Dennis eases his arms off Mac's shoulders and taps him on the side of the hip. Mac has started thinking about all the things that he does not, on principle, think about. Dennis just had to go and open the yearbook, just had to go and let these things be free, when Mac was so, so happy with the state of things.

Dennis coughs. "Hey. Are you gonna sell me some weed, or what?"

Mac flexes his fingers in and out of fists a few times and then turns around. "Fifty."

"_Fifty_?" Dennis barks, his voice too loud for the quiet nighttime playground. "What, are you selling some organically grown pot that angels fertilize with their own heavenly shit?"

"It's from my dad's prison connects. Good shit."

"Prison shit isn't good shit."

"Look, are you gonna buy, or are you just gonna insult my product?"

"I'm gonna buy." Dennis taps his fingers along his bottom lip, his hand crooking in a weird way. He's trying to smoke, Mac realizes. Dennis hasn't smoked regularly since their twenties.

_I don't know, Mac, that guy, I don't have a good feeling about him — leave it, Charlie, he's paying fifty for weed, he's just an idiot — I don't know, Mac, I just don't fucking know — I still think he's weird — give it time, you just gotta get to know him —_ _okay, he's not that bad, kinda cool, but I don't see what you see in him — I don't _see _anything, what are you talking about — just leave it — hey, the Flyers game tonight, man, I can't believe it — are we ever going to talk about the fact that you guys, like, kiss? — no, we're not going to talk about it, I have no idea what you're talking about — okay, cool, hey, it's nice out, you think he wants to go cat hunting —_

"I don't actually have any weed."

"Yeah, me neither." Dennis takes his fingers from his mouth, looks at them with mild surprise. "We should start smoking again. Why'd we stop, anyway?"

Mac shrugs. "I don't know, like, it made us fat and lazy. And the guy I got it from got married and had three kids or something."

Dennis shrugs, too. "I want a cigarette," he observes, and then he grins. His teeth are still too white, flashing in the nighttime. "I think it's working."

Mac shakes his head. "I'm just not feeling it."

"You are so feeling it. You immediately did your whole tough-guy posture."

"That's just how I stand!"

"No, it's not, there's a very specific way—"

"You're watching the way I _stand_?"

"How can I _not_? You have the posture of an impotent action star!"

"What does that even mean?!"

"You think you're so tough, and you're not!"

"I'm not tough? Yeah? You wanna go? We can go right here, right now, bro. Come on. Let's go."

"Mac." Dennis rolls his eyes and puts a hand on Mac's outstretched wrist, poised for a strike. "I am not fighting you on a playground in the middle of the night. I just wanted you to see that it's easy to regress."

Mac's heart flips and flutters and falls and then he has an absolutely ecstatic realization. "Charlie isn't here!" Mac steps out of Dennis's space. "Dude, if we're doing high school, Charlie was _always _there."

"He was not." Dennis scrunches his nose. "I can think of some very notable times Charlie was not, in fact, there." The tone of his voice lets Mac knows what he's talking about. Mac flushes, hot with shame, hot with arousal, the heat high on his cheeks and low in his groin. That part has never changed. No need to go back.

"I guess I still don't get it. What are you trying to do? Why do you want to pretend to be in high school again?"

"To remind you and myself how high school was." Dennis steps back into Mac's space, holds his attention with his eyes, his voice. Dennis makes Mac feel not just like the only person in the room, but the only other person, period. "I was superior, I was on top, and you and Charlie were my back-up. My support. I will not let that reunion and those—those ugly, fat fucks make me think any differently. Make me doubt my own memories. No, I will not allow that. So we're going to step back into those memories, and then we're both going to feel better."

With Dennis, there reaches a certain point where resistance becomes futile. Mac has worked that point for years, nudging it further and further back, getting Dennis to give in, but Dennis knows how to push back, too. Their relationship—friendship, Mac corrects—is an endless struggle, sculpted in stone by some ancient Greek jack-off, standing forever whether in the bottom of the sea or in a museum niche. Sometimes Mac wins and he can talk Dennis down from the ledge, can get him to stop scratching at his own skin, but sometimes Dennis wins and Mac recognizes this—sometimes he doesn't recognize it, and those are not great times indeed—and this is a time where Mac recognizes this. There is nothing in this roleplay for Mac. Mac doesn't know if Dennis actually knows this, or if Dennis really does think it'll be soothing for Mac to travel back in time and have his heart built up and broken and built up and broken again. It doesn't matter. Dennis wants it. That matters.

"We went to your place," Mac says. "After that first time on the playground. You talked to me about Star Wars for like three hours and we ate cereal."

"It was not three hours, but yes, we went back to my place."

"Can't do that now, though."

"Nope."

"You think Charlie's mom will let us go and hang out in her basement?"

"You know, I don't know." Dennis shrugs. "We could stay here. We spent time here."

"Not at night, though, 'cause we didn't want to get the cops called on us. Speaking of, that's a possibility, Dennis. We _have _to look pretty weird out here."

"Let's just go back to the apartment." Dennis sighs. "That place has been the same for however long we've had it, hasn't it?"

"Yeah."

Back in the Rover, back in the passenger seat. Dennis still plays his music on CDs, still has them dashed in the same place. Mac pulls them open and flicks through them. The selection is largely the same—that's the thing about 80's music, it doesn't really change—but there's a few new additions. Scratched-up black disks with heavy drums and screeching guitars, a few blank silver ones with things like _MAC MIX – 5/24/03 _written on them. He pulls one of the mixes out and turns it in his hand, lets the streetlights cast little rainbows across its surface. God is amazing, Mac thinks. He gives us these little things to love and appreciate every day. Too bad Mac can't appreciate them, his soul marred, his actions sinful.

"Mac," Dennis says. His voice is soft and apologetic, so much so that it catches Mac's attention, a bird dog pointing. "Put that down, man. You're gonna blind me."

At the apartment, they stand and look at each other. Dennis turns a lamp on in the living room, but that's the only light, apart from some streetlamp and moonlight residue coming in through the big feature window. Dennis closes in on Mac and kisses him.

_"You just have to go along with him." Mac passes the bag back to Charlie and scratches at his nose. "That's it. He comes up with cool shit. He's easy to get along with if you know how."_

_"I think only you know how, dude."_

_"Yeah. I totally cracked the Dennis Reynolds code." Mac grins. "I'm like a horse whisperer."_

_"Oh, man, don't even get me _started _on horses—"_

_Mac's body feels both heavy and shaky, like he's been at the beach all day with the waves racking over him. It's the wear-off of the adrenaline and the noise from the Flyers game. It's the awareness that he does actually need to do an assignment, his one time in three months or so, so that they don't kick him out and fast track his life down the toilet. He knows that's where his life is going, but a stupid little optimistic part of him keeps trudging on as if that's not the case anyway. But Dennis is here and Dennis has a plan. Dennis is telling Mac what to do. Mac is listening. He shuts up and just does, like a good boy should, like Dennis likes._

_Dennis brings him to Dennis's nice home with the manicured lawn and the expensive cars parked out front, where Dennis tells Mac not to worry about the mud on his shoes because the cleaning lady will vacuum the shit out of the rug, anyway. At night, though, the Reynolds house is less beautiful and impressive and more creepy and sad. Nobody leaves lights on. Mac thinks that's it, the lack of any lit up square windows, warm and inviting. Mac's house may never have the smell of a fresh-cooked meal like Charlie's does, or the clean carpets and expensive silverware like Dennis's does, but at least his parents will leave a light on._

_Dennis doesn't need to touch Mac to get him to follow him but he touches him anyway. He touches him so much. It makes Mac's heart beat fast every time. He keeps telling himself it'll wear off, that he's just excited to be around the rich kid, but it never wears off, and he's excited but in a different, painful way. So painful. Dennis encourages it, that bastard, all smiles and eyes and hands. He can't be like that, though. He's always talking about the girls he sleeps with. He seems to really like it, too. Once he told Mac all about Maureen Ponderosa, when they were drunk and high and alone late in the night, and Mac sat there and listened and wondered why he wanted to throttle a girl he had never thought much about at all until then._

_The last thing Mac expects when they get into Dennis's room is that Dennis kisses him._

In the present day—but is it really, though? It feels the same. A soft kiss that makes Mac's knees start to knock against each other. Dennis prodding his mouth open slowly, gently. Mac's hands hovering around Dennis's waist, afraid to land, afraid that they touch down they will never take off again. (They have touched down. They have never taken off again.)

Dennis pulls back and rubs a thumb along Mac's cheek. "I'll do your Chem homework tomorrow during lunch," he whispers.

"It's the equations," Mac says, his voice hoarse and thick. "Where you have to balance them. I don't get it, man."

Dennis laughs. "'Cause you're fucking stupid."

"Being stupid isn't a bad thing."

"I mean, empirically, it is."

"_Empirically_? That's a science word."

"We're talking about science."

"I don't want to talk about science."

"What do you want to do?"

The Mac of then and now unite as he says, "I want to go bed. Won't your parents hear us, up and talking like this?"

Dennis scratches the back of his neck. "Yeah," he admits. "They'd be mad. They like to have their sleep. Mom gets weird when she's tired."

"So, let's go to sleep."

"I wanna have a cigarette first." Dennis turns and goes to the kitchen. He keeps a pack under the sink, pushed way back behind cleaning supplies and extra trash bags.

Mac stops him, grabs his wrist. "Don't smoke," he says. "You'll die."

Dennis shifts his weight and Mac waits for the snappy comeback, but Dennis says, instead, "Maybe that's _why _I smoke."

That's not a present-day Dennis answer; that's too vulnerable, too raw, too true. That's before Dennis finished building his walls and before he quit smoking at all. Mac thinks of Dennis emaciated and in a hospital bed, no hair, his breath a death rattle in his elephant skin throat. Mac thinks about sitting in a doctor's office in paper gowns and Dennis's feet crossed at the ankle. Dennis is delicate, fragile, breakable. Mac pulls Dennis by the wrist and crushes him against him, hugs him hard.

"You're not allowed," Mac says. "Don't talk about that type of shit. Don't—don't leave." He says it to Dennis back then—don't leave, don't go to college, don't leave me alone to hang out in liquor stores and deal drugs and do fuck-all and forget how you feel and how you kiss—and now—don't leave, stay here, don't die, stay here, stay in my life. That unspoken anxiety: they both know Mac will never leave. They both know Dennis could.

Dennis laughs into Mac's shoulder and eases back. "Let's just go to bed, yeah?"

They sleep like they did when they were teenagers: separate pillows, separate blankets. They'd start off back-to-back and, inevitably, find they had rolled towards each other in the night, noses just inches apart, eyelashes and gentle sleeping breaths. Mac would wake, a much lighter sleeper than Dennis, and stay very still.

"I gotta say," Mac says now, laying on his back and staring at the ceiling and breaking the immersion, because his heart is pounding hard and he won't be able to sleep until he sets things right. "This didn't work for me."

"Not one of my better ideas," Dennis mumbles. He rolls over, faces Mac. "It just feels weird, I guess. To pretend to be me back then."

"Yeah, like. I'm me and I'm not me."

"That's the most philosophical thing you've ever said."

"Shut up," but there's no fight in it. "Do you feel better, though?"

Dennis shrugs one shoulder. "Like I said, it didn't seem to work. I think I argued against it in my paper, way back then, anyway. I should dig it up, revise it a little. Send it out for publication, you know?"

"Can we lay this whole goddamned thing to rest?" Mac flops over too, facing Dennis.

Dennis considers. "Yeah."

"Okay." Mac lets out a long breath. His body relaxes more into the bed, tensions loosening he didn't know that he was holding in the first place, once again. Forever that feeling, with Dennis. "Goodnight, bro."

"Goodnight, Mac."

They fall asleep facing each other. (Some things change, some things don't. You are both you and you are not you. Past and present. This is all starting to sound awfully Buddhist, or at least pretty un-Christlike, so Mac lets it go.)

_"Dennis got accepted to Penn, right?"_

_"Yeah. Don't talk to me about it."_

_"I'm still going to be here."_

_"I know."_

_"I know it's not the same—"_

_"Shut up, Charlie, okay? Just shut up!"_

_"Mac, I—"_

_"It's not like he's even moving out of the _state, _much less the goddamn _city. _We'll see him all the time. We got Schmitty. I don't see what the big deal is, so I don't think we need to talk about it."_

_"That's cool, man."_

_"Of course he's going to college. He's the smartest one out of all of us."_

_"I mean, yeah, like, he is. That's true."_

_"He's the smartest person I know."_

_"That might be pushing it a little—"_

_"Charlie, you wouldn't know intelligence if you snorted it."_

_"I don't really _snort_, I huff."_

_"Yeah, yeah true. You got any? I've had enough of this shit."_

_"Sure, man."_

_"I mean, what's four years, anyway? That's fuckin' nothing. If he even makes it! Hey, he'll be able to introduce us some to some college girls, though. That'll be cool. I hear they're super easy."_

_"Yeah, yeah, college girls and shit. Sweet. Let's get high."_

_"Let's just get fuckin' high, man."_


End file.
